


que sera sera

by astrogeny



Category: Dangan Ronpa
Genre: Canonical Character Death, F/M, spoilers obvs, vague implications of abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-07
Updated: 2013-04-07
Packaged: 2017-12-07 19:52:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,153
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/752404
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/astrogeny/pseuds/astrogeny
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Four times Mukuro tried to save Naegi's life and didn't end up needing to.  Finally kickstarting that new 30 day prompt challenge I've been procrastinating on for like a week.  Obviously, this has spoilers for the entire first game.</p>
            </blockquote>





	que sera sera

IV.

The webs of gossip at Hope's Peak are intricate, erratic, bizarrely disjointed beyond even the outrageous norm of any other high school.  From e-mail to notes in donut boxes to cryptic messages in greasy tarot cards, news travels with a distinct air of unapologetic bias.  Mukuro passes nothing along unless she's told to, and pays no attention unless Junko throws it in her face,

"Isn't it despair-inducing!" flicking her nail polish brush so hard that a single glob of bright red goes flying right at Mukuro's face.  She sidesteps neatly, waits--this is Junko's standard introduction to nearly every one of their one-sided conversations.  "Well," Junko prompts, dragging out the word with overly deliberate childishness, "Go on, ask me about this thing that just completely dragged my day down into the darkest, nastiest, smelliest pits of despair!"

"What's the thing that dragged you down into the darkest, nastiest, smelliest pits of despair?"  she says it with a straight face, deadpan, robbing the words of the gleeful audacity they always have when Junko says them first.  A wrinkle of the nose, clear as any military hand signal,

"Wow, disgusting.  Absolutely the worst twin for playing mirror games with, one hundred and two percent."  She closes the bottle of nail polish and shimmies up to Mukuro's side, so close that the thick fumes are the only thing left in the air between them.  "There's been a kidnapping," Junko announces like she's just scored perfectly on a difficult test the rest of the class failed, "You know that fortune-teller, yeah?  The Super High School Level Super Senior?  Anyways, he got himself into a bit of a mess with the yakuza, can you believe it?  From what I hear, they're pretty fond of selling organs on the black market," probably a lie, Mukuro's dealt with them before, "But, like, would anyone actually buy such defective parts?  You could take that guy's kidneys and then die of alcohol poisoning the second you began to drink."

"I guess," tentative, "That would be despair-inducing for him, wouldn't it."  Junko gives her a look that could peel paint.

"Oh my god, you really are hopeless!  I'm going to go to the headmaster right now and tell him to officially change your talent to Super High School Level Hopeless!  Which, by the way, is totally different from Super High School Level Despair.  The difference between a crocodile and an alligator different!  Almost total opposites!"  With no idea what that actual difference is, she waits at attention for Junko to meander her way around to the point.  "The point is, Hagakure isn't the point at all.  They're totally free to sell his organs off to feed the homeless or whatever, nobody cares about that.  What's really, really, super despair-inducing is that," a dramatic pause, almost the kind worth a heavy sigh, a roll of the eyes, "They took Naegi-kun with him, too."  

Mukuro has watched a man's head blown off not two feet away from her and remained unflinching.  She's held a body as the life rushes out of it in tattered, pleading gasps, and she's never stopped to wonder how it might feel to scrabble with utter futility for your own life.  She's only ever actually spoken to Naegi Makoto once or twice, but there is a sick, unfamiliar twist in her stomach.  Tactical, this must be Junko's angle--her own sister's completely irrational despair is a rare treat, she works for it.

"Can you imagine?  Such a sweet kid, I bet he's gonna think they won't really hurt him right up until they bring out the thumbscrews," cheeks flushed, lips slightly parted, she's the undisputed queen of overreaction but Mukuro is internally giving her a run for her money.  Those big green eyes with soft lashes going wide with fear, realizing the second before he begins to scream that he trusts the world too much.  

"Is the school doing anything," not even a question, already considering how to arm herself and find him in a way that will bring her as little of Junko's gleeful scorn as possible.

"Eh, I'm sure our ace detective is on the case," pantomiming a looking glass held up to her eye Sherlock Holmes style, "But it'd be soooooo much more interesting if she screwed up for once, right?  Like, say, if she got led off on a false trail?  Those yakuza guys aren't a very patient bunch."  She might as well have confessed to leading Kirigiri and anyone else off on a wild goose chase, but not even Junko could match someone of that caliber--Mukuro cuts off the thought mid-stream, buries it six feet under, because of course Junko could make Kirigiri, make the world chase their own tails for the hell of it.  "It really is the worst--if they're found, they'll probably have to come back in little baggies," a sigh, almost longing, "And to think, poor, innocent Naegi-kun won't even be around to help me finish the project we were assigned to do together.  I don't think there are enough 'supers' in the world to describe how super-despair-inducing this is!"

Junko's childishness has a way of hitting like a truck.

"Oh."

"'Oh'?  Be more sympathetic!  It's due at the end of this week, and Naegi-kun's gone and gotten slowly, agonizingly chopped to pieces!  This day is the worst, he's the worst, and you, sis," backing out towards the door, wagging her finger, "Are the most gullible schmuck I've ever met."

The door slams shut on Junko's manic leer, and it isn't until Mukuro almost rams down Naegi in the hallway that she realizes she couldn't have done anything at all for him, if only because somebody else had saved him first.

****

III.

****

There are fifteen of them, sitting in a slightly crooked row of cheap plastic chairs.  Sixteen, counting the one currently in the classroom, pledging to lock himself into the school forever in order to incubate some hopeless glimmer of hope.  Junko sits at the end of the line, Mukuro at the beginning, and she tries to imagine what her sister will say to the headmaster when her turn comes.  The sympathetic angle would be the most effective (not that Mukuro could pull it herself)--oh, Mister Headmaster, I'm so scared, but I'll be strong because I know how much the hope of the future means to you, a flutter of the eyelashes to remind him that his own daughter will not have looked him in the face even once throughout the whole interview.  As for her own approach, it's already been scripted by Junko, a dress rehearsal for the greater performance they're all hurtling helplessly towards.

The door clicks like a gun being cocked, and Mukuro's eyes snap compulsively to meet Naegi's as he steps out into the hallway.  She studies him like a bad habit, furrowed brow, lips puckered in a small, concentrated frown, he doesn't seem afraid.  If anything, he looks curious, one finger curled over the chin as if he's trying to solve a puzzle.  Hapless, Mukuro wonders if his hands are calloused (doubtful), what it would feel like to take them in her own and try to hold them gently.  

"Ikusaba-san, you're next," he says, and when she stands the top of his head, scruffy hair and all, barely even reaches the bottom of her nose.

"I am," at an impasse, wanting to keep him right here while he's still full of the kind of overly saccharine empathy for everyone around him that she can almost hear Junko gagging at from her seat.  "What did he want you to say?"

"Uh?" apparently unaccustomed to having her respond in anything but monosyllabic affirmations, she can hardly blame him.

"Is it classified?"

"I guess not?  Since the headmaster and what's left of the school are keeping them available for us to look at.  It's..." he trails off, fitting together the words in his head like links in a chain, she can see every detail of the way he thinks but it never ceases to fascinate.  "It's surprisingly simple, actually.  I'd thought, well, since we're making such a huge commitment, there would be more formality to it or something, but all the headmaster really asked me to say was that I'd agree to stay in Hope's Peak as long as necessary to keep a seed of hope--that's what he called it--alive."  His glance darts down, to the left, even he is having hesitations.  He has a family, Mukuro remembers abruptly, two painfully average parents and a painfully average little sister to go with the most extraordinary boy she really knows nothing about at all.  He has a family he's leaving behind just as doggedly as she's following her own, and for one foolish second, she wants to let him loose, set him free into some safe pasture where he can hope all he wants and never lose the softness in his hands.

"I see," the entire hallway is watching them with varied levels of interest and emotion, Naegi's made it clear the magnitude of what they're all about to commit to, even if none of them could ever guess at the truth.  Force of habit drags her gaze back to Junko, all the way at the far side, there was nothing on their script to account for this.  A frown flashes across Junko's face, so fast that it might not have been there at all, but she nods her chin subtly, it's time to go.

"Ikusaba-san?  The headmaster's probably waiting."

"He is," she agrees, with all the hamfisted grace she can muster, drinking in the last dregs of his confidence that she'll never see again.  She walks through the door and shuts it behind her back, and the classroom is too cold for comfort.

****

II.

****

"Yeah, a herbivore boy," Junko's broad, snappy gal voice gets easier to imitate the less she thinks about it.  "Y'know, the kind of boy who," she leans down towards him, waggles her eyebrows, smiles like Junko would as she breathes in the scent of his skin just the way Junko wouldn't, "takes it, yeah?"

"No," Naegi says, a flush in his cheeks, is he heady because he no longer knows her?  "I, I don't think I've ever heard the term before."

"You don't hang around girls much, do ya?" forcing herself back, a bright red plastic nail just barely touching the center of his chest.  

"Uh, I guess not?"

"Lemme break this down for you, okay?  So there's regular guys--big nasty, alpha types, following girls down the streets to scare 'em for shits and giggles.  Then there's regular girls, the kinds who let themselves get chased 'cause everyone tells them it's not like they can do anything about it.  But some girls, well," a conspiratory smile like he knows what she's talking about, "Some girls get fed up with that.  Or maybe they were born fed up with it, who knows.  I'm not, like, a psychologist or anything.  So these girls, they're the carnivore girls.  They follow the boys down dark alleys and snap at their heels just for the hell of it, just to show 'em that they can.  But if there's girls like that, then there's boys who just wanna stay off the streets entirely, right?  Good boys who use 'boku' to talk about themselves and always tuck their shirts into their pants 'cause they don't wanna cause trouble--they're the herbivore boys."

Naegi digests this in silence, but he seems like he's actually putting a lot of thought into the matter.  She's told him already about "her" past, a bizarre amalgam of what she and Junko actually experienced mixed with fanciful details straight out of a josei manga, but she's acting off a one-sided script--Naegi's reactions are more unpredictable than Junko may have accounted for.

"So you're saying I'm a herbivore boy?" a little sheepish at himself for his tucked-in shirt and his manner of speech all hitting the mark precisely.

"You betcha," predatory grin filling in for what he shouldn't need to say.  Mukuro's seen deer before, in Nara, in America, in icy wastelands where nothing should want to live, and every time she looks into Naegi's eyes she sees the way they freeze, full of fear and trusting all in one.  Enoshima Junko, the aggregate fake of a thousand scripted whimsies, she could have him if she wanted, the perfect pinup girl condescending to a bashful, average little boy-toy like Naegi, willing to protect him just for the poetic value of reversing their gender roles.  Ikusaba Mukuro couldn't.  She's a carnivore girl herself, in more ways than her brassy persona ever could be, but this Junko only teases Naegi--Mukuro would rip his throat out trying to kiss it.

A pregnant pause, then,

"Say, Enoshima-san?"

"Yeah?"

"I don't mean to offend you--so tell me if I'm saying something wrong--but could it be that you used to be one of those 'regular girls'?  I mean, just based on what you told me before, I was thinking that it sounds an awful lot like you're talking about yourself."

He's done it again, and Mukuro is left rifling through every dialogue branch Junko ever taught her to scrape up a response.  Does he suspect something?  Is the game in jeopardy?  She was never given an explicit directive on whether or not to blow her cover should a student somehow recover their memories, but she doubts they'd be allowed to live.  The camera in the corner of the room winks glittering eyelash extensions at her, Junko's mocking smile is the reflection of Mukuro and Naegi inches apart in the lens.  She scans his face like he's a battlefield, looking for traps, the disingenuous--if anything, having his memories wiped has only made him even more honest.

"Enoshima-san?  I--I didn't hurt your feelings, did I?"  A scoff tears itself from Mukuro's throat, her greatest Junko impression yet.

"Hurt my feelings?  Jeez, that's beyond herbivore boy tier--you're like, back in elementary school now."  He laughs, relieved to have kept the peace and completely willing to take the slight against him.

"I don't know, being a, uh, a herbivore boy doesn't actually sound that bad.  Especially if the only other option is being someone so disgusting."  His face belies more experience with that type than he lets on, more experience than Mukuro has ever actually had.

"That's the spirit!" clapping him on the shoulder, watching him shy away, all part of the act, "Hey, tell you what: when we get outta here, I'll make sure to find you a real sharp-toothed carnivore girl to go with that sharp-toothed intuition of yours, okay?"  

Naegi stammers vague protests, that wouldn't be fair, it's okay, that's what friends do, and for the first time since SHSL Despair was formed, Mukuro feels a level of personal investment in their cause, knowing that nobody else will ever get to him.  She wonders, watching him wave and leave the room, if this is her first truly selfish thought.

****

I.

****

It took longer than Mukuro would have expected.  She's no detective, her social IQ could be bested by a rock, but she doesn't even need to look at Naegi's face to know he's not the killer.  She looks anyways, almost in spite of herself, to see how he's handling the accusations hanging over his head before the trials are even announced.  He's shaken, pale, eyes darting across the empty spaces between people like he's waiting for an attack.  Truly a herbivore in every sense of the word, but even deer can fight, Mukuro thinks to herself.  She'd like to believe he has it in him, to somehow struggle away from every last pair of hungry jaws and leap across a gorge to freedom, but she is supposed to believe in nothing but Junko.

Monobear talks, and Mukuro could speak every word along with him by now, his dialogue disappointingly, refreshingly predictable.  He doesn't even turn her way for a cue, but she knows it when she hears it,

"Hey, wait just a minute!" to her own ears, she sounds petty and insecure, speaking the words of a child who's only just realized the harsh world she thought she lived in was rather kind after all.  Mukuro's no more a poet than she is an actress, but she's started to wonder if the fake Junko's personality is all a subtle dig at the other students from the real Junko.  It wouldn't be terribly surprising, for all Junko's natural inclination towards the unpredictable.  Monobear launches into their routine, some sort of awful parody of a manzai act, and Mukuro follows along with as much sincerity as she can muster.  

The plan is simple ("Simple enough even for you, sis")--they argue, Monobear threatens her, and she's "locked up" in a "detention" as punishment for her misbehaviour.  From there, the other students can still visit her, and she can begin creating fault lines in their already crumbling attempt at a united front while watching them from hidden surveillance equipment.  Whenever the final trial is completed, either by the culprit winning or by only three students remaining to create a situation where nobody could murder and get away with it, Mukuro is meant to reveal herself as "the mastermind" and play through one last game to decisively crush the hopes of the survivors.  Simple, simple and detached enough that she can think of it as a battle plan, think of her fellow students as circles on a diagram waiting to be crossed off.

"I'll get you first!" Monobear cries with far more gusto than is strictly necessary.  Instantaneously, Mukuro slams her foot down on his stomach, pinning him to the ground with ease.  In a situation with any sort of combat, it's an effort to contort her face into some boorish mask, but she's fairly sure she's doing a reasonable impression of brutes who let their emotions get to their head.  Even caked in Junko's makeup, she must look hideous--for a moment, she glances up to see the other students' expressions.  Are they disgusted by such cavalier naivete, or do they take any brash, physical action as heroic?  Monobear is still talking, doubtless detailing how he's going to lock her up or being such a naughty girl, and she meets Naegi's eyes.  The more she thinks about it, in the end, she decides it would be better if he dies early, if only to prevent his optimism from being slowly stomped out, if only so that she doesn't have to feel like she's betraying him.

"Save me, Gungnir the Spear!" not on the script, and someone cries out--pure, wordless shock.    It isn't until blood catches in her throat that Mukuro realizes it's her.

For a soldier who's never been wounded, getting stabbed to death feels an awful lot like falling in love with Naegi Makoto.


End file.
